10 Examples of Customer Service Activities

We present a series of customer service activities that will not only help you to bring some extra fun into the remote workplace, but will likely also improve performance.

What Makes These Customer Service Activities So Great?

Our ten customer service activities include a mix of short and sharp, periodical and cultural activities…

Our ten customer service activities include a mix of short and sharp, periodical and cultural activities, designed to improve different aspects of your customer service.

Many of these activities require little to no planning or expensive resources and will help you when you feel like you need to inject some energy into your team or want to illustrate a particular point.

Each of these activities has been suggested to us by Caroline Cooper, an experienced contact centre trainer and founder of Naturally Loyal.

We hope you find them practical to use in your contact centre!

Fun Customer Service Activities

1. Making the First Move

Set your team this challenge: next time you are out shopping and talk to a member of the service team or shop assistant, greet them in a warm and friendly manner.

We’ve probably all experienced a situation where a cashier or an assistant doesn’t greet us right away, but now you can practise your rapport skills by making the first move and greeting them.

In many cases, your enthusiasm is enough to jolt them into providing you with better service. And if it doesn’t, it’s still good practice since not all customers will respond positively to your greetings.

They could practise this when out socializing with family and friends or even with someone (socially distanced) at the bus stop…

“They could practise this when out socializing with family and friends or even with someone (socially distanced) at the bus stop,” adds Caroline, who suggested this activity to us.

Schedule a follow-up session a few days later for the team to share their experiences and learning points.

The benefits of this fun customer service activity include:

• It encourages advisors to actively think about what constitutes good customer service
• It helps advisors to build a perspective of what it is like to be in the customer’s shoes
• It helps to develop rapport-building skills, especially when paired with a follow-up discussion

2. Mystery Shop

Set a challenge to go out into the high street. Any retail store, a coffee shop will do, it doesn’t have to be the same industry as your business.

Their mission is to come back with at least three ideas you could “borrow” to apply in your own business to improve upon your customer experience in some way. Depending on the level of your team, you may need to sub them the price of the coffee!

Their mission is to come back with at least three ideas you could “borrow” to apply in your own business to improve upon your customer experience in some way.

Just remember, though, when carrying out this customer service activity, to keep the brief tight and ensure you have a formal virtual session to share their ideas.

You don’t need to send everyone out on the same day – as you must stay cautious of COVID-19 – and you may add the incentive that the day they conduct their research they get to leave early or get an extra-long lunch break.

The benefits of this fun customer service activity include:

• It engages advisors with the wider customer experience, not just customer service
• It helps advisors to think creatively about what makes customers happy
• You may just pick up some great ideas that will add to improve your customer experience proposition

Mystery shopping your own organization is also a great method of understanding your customers. For more on this topic, read our article: Really Understand Why Your Customers Are Contacting You

3. Job Swaps

The job of a contact centre advisor can be quite repetitive, so it is good to do what you can to stop team members becoming stale in their jobs by moving everyone around occasionally – if that’s possible in the new remote working environment.

By doing this, you can also help show advisors other parts of the business that they may want to explore further as part of their own personal development.

Many of these moves won’t be permanent, but encouraging the team to do a different job every now and again promotes teamwork.

Of course, many of these moves won’t be permanent, but encouraging the team to do a different job every now and again promotes teamwork, as well as giving you more flexibility.

The more everyone has an understanding of each other’s roles, the more they are likely to take on responsibility for customers’ queries and requests rather than passing the customer on to a colleague or blaming others when there’s a problem.

Also, if you can bring people from outside of the contact centre to experience life as a remote advisor for a day or two, they can see the potential you have as a strategic resource.

The benefits of this fun customer service activity include:

• It helps you show interest in the development of your team
• It increases the understanding of others’ roles and therefore promotes teamwork
• It offers the chance for departments to strengthen their ties

4. A Team Quiz

Refresher training should be fun, to help the team engage with learning. So, refresh your refresher training by running a virtual team quiz instead.

It’s a great way of testing their understanding and knowledge, without the groans that they’ve done it all before and, worse still, feel insulted that you think they need reminding.

It’s a great way of testing their understanding and knowledge, without the groans that they’ve done it all before…

Contact centre quiz question ideas may include:

• Who can find a certain article in the knowledge base first?
• Which of the following criteria is included in our quality scorecard?
• What do we mean by “the power of one rule?”

You can also use it as a test for knowledge after any initial training. It’s great for teamwork too.

As an alternative to you writing the questions, ask the team to come up with their own questions. They can either contribute one question, or divide the team into small groups and ask each team to devise a series of questions which will be asked to the other group(s).

The benefits of this fun customer service activity include:

• It makes refresher training more engaging
• It helps us to reinforce key messages, without being too patronizing
• It encourages the team to take charge of their learning, if we challenge them to design the quiz

Find more contact centre quiz ideas in our article: 3 Ways to Have Fun in the Contact Centre

5. Love or Loathe

All your team are customers at some point so ask what’s important to them – put them in the customer’s shoes!

This activity begins by having team members exchange personal experiences of good and bad customer service from outside the business: “love and loathe”. Ask advisors to stand in pairs/threes to do this.

This activity begins by having team members exchange personal experiences of good and bad customer service from outside the business: “love and loathe”…

Each group should report back with one or two examples, which you then write out on a trusty flipchart – maybe positioned behind the leader on a video meeting – which is divided into two columns.

Then, ask the group: how many of these would apply to your business? It is likely that all of the examples listed will!

Once you’ve raised this interesting conversation, ask the team to rate on a scale of 1 to 10:

• How well do you achieve all those examples in the “love” column?
• How well do you avoid all those in the “loathe” column?

Now pick out one from each list to work on, asking the team for their ideas or suggestions of how we can increase our scores in each area.

The benefits of this fun customer service activity include:

• It encourages advisors to think outside of the box, in terms of how you can improve standard practice
• It helps you to gain an idea of the obstacles advisors face in delivering great customer service
• It reminds advisors of how it feels to be a customer and how they “love” to be treated

6. Buzz Briefings

Many contact centres start the day with a quick team meeting, but why not take this to the next stage with a daily “buzz briefing” – which can be done virtually.

Use these briefings to review the previous day and:

• Share feedback from customers
• Congratulate team members on any great examples of customer service
• Update everyone on what’s going on in the business today that could have any impact on customers

Just remember, the objective of these briefings is to create a buzz and enthusiasm for customer service and the day ahead, so, as the name suggests, these briefings should be brief.

The objective of these briefings is to create a buzz and enthusiasm for customer service and the day ahead…

Yet, according to Caroline Cooper: “One great addition to these briefings is to focus on one aspect of customer service you particularly want the team to pay special attention to. This helps to put the focus back on the customer.”

Also, it can be great to conduct these huddles standing up and maybe as a huddle to bring everyone together, with each advisor taking it in turns to run the briefing with the team leader – to further encourage advisors.

The benefits of this fun customer service activity include:

• It helps to cultivate a customer focus and brings people together
• It sets an energetic pace for the day, getting things off on the right foot
• It provides a platform to show recognition for good work

If you were looking for activities specifically for customer service training, read our article: 9 Fun Customer Service Training Activities

7. The Circle of Influence

Next time there is a service-related problem, use your next buzz briefing or virtual huddle to complete the following:

Step 1 – Ask the team to mind map all the things that contributed to the issue. This will include customers’ attitudes and perceptions as well as potential operational practices and team behaviours.

Step 2 – Draw two circles on the flipchart, one inside the other. The inner circle represents the things they can influence and the outer circle things they cannot influence.

Step 3 – Ask which points from the list that you created in your mind map during Step 1 would go where.

Step 4 – Highlight that we can’t change the customers’ perceptions or initial emotions, nor can we change third-party factors that might also have contributed.

Step 5 – Start to think about the ones we can directly influence, i.e. our response and our own behaviours.

Step 6 – Then, we can begin to consider what we can additionally to do indirectly influence our customers. So, draw a dotted line outside the inner circle and ask: what could we do to expand our circle of influence?

The benefits of this fun customer service activity include:

• It highlights the things that advisors are directly responsible for, helping to set clear expectations
• It encourages advisors to think creatively about what more they can do to better meet customer needs
• It helps us to gather ideas for how we can help to create a better customer experience

8. A Customer Service Vision

Great customer service starts with a clear and compelling vision that describes how you want your customers to feel about your service. This vision acts as a compass to guide your actions and keeps you focused on delivering value.

If you don’t already have a customer service vision, involve your team in creating one and start by asking everyone how they’d like customers to feel as a result of doing business with you in a virtual meeting.

If you don’t already have a customer service vision, involve your team in creating one…

List all the words people come up with, using their exact terminology, and prompt them for any others that you feel should be on the list.

Put the team into smaller groups – on separate video meetings – then divide up the words between them (group similar words if possible, but it’s not essential).

Now, ask each group to define the actions and behaviours that will enable customers to feel this way. i.e. things you’d need to do or say in order to create these feelings for your customers.

The second part of the exercise is to focus on how each team member can personally contribute to this. Ask:

• How do you contribute personally?
• How do you want customers to feel about your service?
• Write one sentence that describes your own service vision.

You may wish to post these up on the wall or have each team member post their own vision above their own work area as a constant reminder.

The benefits of this fun customer service activity include:

• It helps to align everyone’s thinking around how they can best serve the customer
• It gives advisors the chance to share best practices in how to meet this vision
• It engages us with how customers feel, which is important as customer emotion becomes a key part of delivering great service.

For more on the topic of customer emotion and its growing influence on the contact centre industry, read our article: 7 Steps to Evoke the Emotions You Want From Your Customers

9. Service Champions

Nominate team members to be ambassadors or champions for different aspects of the customer experience, building on personal strengths.

Advisors can be nominated by their peers for these positions, but they work best when people “apply” for the role – so you can use the position as a development opportunity for those who are invested in personal progression.

Being a champion will hopefully give advisors pride in what they do and they will appreciate that you’ve recognized where they do a good job. This allows the champion to delve deeper into this topic, plus it gets their buy-in – and likely their teammates’ buy-in too.

Being a champion will hopefully give advisors pride in what they do and they will appreciate that you’ve recognized where they do a good job…

Just remember, this doesn’t mean others in the team don’t still contribute, it’s just this person becomes the go-to person for this area.

Champions might be for any aspect of your business, so this might include being champions or experts in each of your products or service offerings – meaning you gain trust and build customers’ confidence when specialist knowledge is needed.

You can also designate champions for different customer groups who really get to understand what’s important to them, or champions for each key stage of the customer journey, or champions for each element of customer service. These areas of customer service may include following up on customer feedback, customer complaints, social media, etc.

Ask the champions to take the lead on their “specialist subject” in virtual meetings and when inducting new team members – so new advisors know who to approach for help in a certain area.

The benefits of this fun customer service activity include:

• It offers advisors a small career progression opportunity
• It helps to reward your strongest advisors and keeps them engaged
• It enables you to strengthen parts of your operation with additional support

10. Just Say Thank You

We have saved the most simple – and arguably the most effective –  idea until last, and that is to simply make sure you say “thank you” regularly.

Recognize and reward good performance, achievements and a job well done. For many, that is all they need to feel encouraged.

If you are genuine in your appreciation, and choose the right moment, a simple but honest appreciative remark can go a very long way.

Caroline Cooper

You can also encourage your team to recognize each other’s good performance and nominate them for a special reward – which can be another way to show your appreciation for hard work.

The rewards can be a “win–win” treat. This would be something like time for a virtual discussion with another contact centre in the business or an invitation to a Call Centre Helper webinar, from which the advisor can pick up an idea or two to help implement when they return.

The benefits of this fun customer service activity include:

• It helps to ensure advisors feel that their hard work is valued
• It is a cost-effective way to “refill” advisor motivation to maintain high performance
• It encourages a positive culture, where we show appreciation to one another

For more reward ideas that are a bit more fancy than saying “thank you”, read our article: How to Improve Your Employee Reward Schemes – With Examples

How Else Can We Inspire Fun in the Contact Centre?

Not content with collating these ten fun customer service activities, we wanted to find out more about how we can create an enjoyable contact centre environment.

So, we got in touch with Sunny Sandwell, Director of Fun at Work, who told us: “There is lots of evidence to suggest that businesses who take proactive steps to better engage their people outperform their competitors that don’t.”

With this in mind, Sunny shares her five keys for inspiring fun in the contact centre.

1. Appoint an In-House Fun Expert – Having someone that will encourage competition between different teams and coordinate the activities will help to add structure to the fun and make sure it doesn’t fall by the wayside. It is best for this to be an advisor, who can get their colleagues invested in the activities.

2. Encourage People to Move Around – We want people to be active on their breaks and even in between calls, so they can get energized and they don’t spend their time switching from their desktop to their phone – screen-to-screen. So, start a most steps competition or set daily challenges to encourage physical activity from remote advisors.

3. Add Some Healthy Competition – When doing activities, like a virtual team quiz, look to include other departments to encourage collaboration and break down silos between everyone. If we add a little edge with a trophy or similar reward, we can add a competitive spirit between the teams as they work closely together.

Sunny Sandwell

4. Don’t Force the Fun – If certain advisors don’t want to take part in certain fun activities, don’t force them – unless the customer service activities are mandatory for training. They will still benefit from having a lively virtual atmosphere and enjoy listening to people having fun.

5. Create a Calendar of Fun Activities – Alongside your mandatory customer service activities, have a calendar of activities that people can dip in and out of. This can include anything from the activities highlighted above to well-being exercises, such as virtual laughter yoga and inspirational talks.

More Activities for Your Remote Advisors

With most advisors now working from home, we don’t want them to feel isolated from the fun culture that we are aiming to achieve with these customer service activities. Doing so will not only damage morale, but it may begin to show in performance statistics.

We therefore want to keep remote advisors engaged with what we are doing in the contact centre and even make sure that they have similar activities to keep them motivated.

To do this, we asked Sunny to share with you the following set of customer service activities, designed specifically for remote advisors.

Fun at Work have created this helpful infographic to maintain fun engagement while many teams are working from home. To see the full version, filled with more customer service activities for remote advisors, click here.

In the image above, we can only see a small taster of the many great exercises that Sunny has put together.

To see all of the other ideas, click on the image and download the full version.

To help solve the other challenges of homeworking, like keeping remote advisors engaged, read our article: 15 Contact Centre Homeworking Problems and How to Overcome Them

Final Thoughts

When it comes to the overall customer experience, your team can be your point of differentiation. These customer service activities have the potential to help you achieve this.

As Caroline tells us: “A happy, involved and confident team can work wonders on your customers and their perception of the service they receive.”

With this in mind, we hope that we’ve inspired you to give some of these customer service activities a go and that they help you to better support your team in supporting customers.

Good luck!

For more on the topic of fun customer service activities to improve contact centre performance, read our articles:

• 16 Customer Service Training Ideas – With Activities, Games and Helpful Techniques
• How to Coach Empathy in the Contact Centre – With Three Training Exercises
• How to Train Active Listening in the Contact Centre – With Four Exercises

Author: Charlie Mitchell
Reviewed by: Jonty Pearce